My Life as a Man by Frederic Lindsay Page A

to go.
Well, that wasn’t quite true. I could have gone to a hotel; Mrs Morton had given me money. True, I’d stuck it in my pocket without looking, as if I could fool both of us into thinking I
wasn’t taking it. But it was notes, all right, a little bundle of them. Enough, surely, for a night’s bed and breakfast. The truth was I’d no idea how much that would be. Thing
was, I’d never been in a hotel. A boarding house would be cheaper, but I’d never been in one of those either. The heavies had checked out Hairy Alec’s once. Wasn’t there a
saying about lightning never striking twice in the same place? I went home.
    ‘What a fool you are,’ Mrs Morton said.
    That was later, of course. I had got off the bus and walked up past the waste ground and there at the top of the hill were a couple of kids standing looking at a car, a big shiny car which had
no business being in the scheme. One of them had a stone in his hand and I could see he was planning to scratch a little revenge on an unfair world, so I suggested they fuck off.
    The girl had given Mrs Morton a cup of tea. She sat there sipping it and the girl said to her, ‘You were right,’ and to me, ‘I didn’t think you’d be
back.’
    I made a modest salt-of-the-earth gesture to indicate how easy it was to misjudge people. All the time I was telling her how Alec was I could feel Mrs Morton’s eyes on me. The funny thing
was, I sensed that she knew how much I was leaving out.
    We got down to that once we were in the car. I could see she wasn’t happy, and I hadn’t even mentioned the ragged scratch I’d seen on the passenger side as I was getting
in.
    ‘You were telling that girl the truth? Your stepfather’s going to be all right?’
    ‘Alec?’ I didn’t think of him as a step- or any other nearly sort of a father.
    ‘Is he going to be all right?’
    ‘He’s not going to die. I thought you were going to wait for me at the hospital.’
    ‘There didn’t seem any point.’ She cleared her throat. ‘I thought if I talked to Bernard that might help.’
    She’d driven home from the hospital. As she turned in to the road where she lived, two men came out of her gate. ‘Just the look of them,’ she said. ‘They weren’t
men who’d any business being at our house.’ She’d driven past without stopping.
    ‘Was one of them a big man in a blue suit?’
    When she said no, a big man in a brown suit, I told her about my encounter at the hospital.
    ‘Bernard’s gone mad,’ she said. ‘What are we going to do?’
    ‘We could go to the police.’
    As soon as I said it, it seemed like a pretty good suggestion. Let somebody else deal with this. It was way beyond me.
    ‘Why should they believe us? Bernard wasn’t there – he didn’t do anything himself. And on the way to the hospital you said yourself your stepfather is the kind of man who
gets into all kinds of trouble. Borrowing money,’ she added, which made me laugh.
    ‘What’s so funny?’ she asked.
    ‘You make it sound as if that’s the worst trouble you can think of.’
    I say ‘laugh’, but I wasn’t all that amused. It was only more hot air blasting out in contempt for her big house, her comfort, even the money she’d given me as a handout.
Being frightened doesn’t make people nicer to one another.
    ‘What a fool you are,’ she said.
    After that we didn’t speak, and I looked out of the window for a while until I realised we’d passed the Kelvin Hall twice.

 
    CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
    ‘T hird time,’ I said, breaking my silence.
    ‘What?’ she said, breaking hers, for which I was grateful. I’d thought she wasn’t going to answer me. I hadn’t anticipated the pleasure I felt when she did.
    ‘We’ve gone past the Kelvin Hall three times.’
    ‘Does it matter?’
    ‘We’re going round in circles.’
    ‘I wonder what it would be like to do that for ever,’ she said, so quietly she might have been talking to herself.
    It sounded like hell to me.
    ‘Not